Putin’s Imperium of the Mind

VLADIMIR PUTIN BEGAN his invasion of Ukraine when the United States and a less-than-cohesive Europe talked about the consequences, and imposed sanctions that were not meant to hurt him so badly. Such posturing from the pretenders of the unipolar world he despised was inconsequential, for, like any other dictator who was set on the path to the restoration of national glory, he sought his allies elsewhere, not just in the paranoia of a leader denied the respect he deserves from the masters of the so-called free world but in the imagined history of humiliations. In that history, constantly altered to fit his oversized sense of hurt, an independent Ukraine, second only to Russia in the imperial imagination that still lingers in the living remains of the USSR, is a mistake—and its le­gitimacy as a sovereign state incompatible with the Greater Russia that soars in his mind. History has given him bad geography, and, from the perspective of the chosen one, an invasion is the inevitability of duty.

It’s this inflated national reconstructor that looms over a world that Putin has taken for granted—a world that has not been prepared for the next big war. A world that was falling into the illusion that the liberal substructure of the post-Cold War World would withstand the madness of a few bad guys seeking the eternity of power in places like Moscow and Beijing. Putin was the biggest baddy of them all, and who, for the last twenty years, was building the Cult of the Reclaimer, the most audacious mythmaking project in post-Soviet Russia, its raw material drawn from the wounded Slavic soul and imperial nostalgia. He had to nurture the imperium of the mind because, around him, the hostility of freedom as defined by the architects of the false unipolar world was making him an outcast, keeping him out of the Western club. The frustration of the isolated dictator came out with defiant clarity in his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference: “What’s a unipolar world? However one might embellish the term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It’s a world in which there is one master, one sovereign…This is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

This defiance—and the rejection of the America-led triumphalism of the post-Cold War World—comes from a man for whom the history the liberal world claims to have won with the end of World War II, and later with the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a lie. Even as he made every institution of post-Soviet Russia an instrument to serve his absolute power, and silenced dissent with nerve gas, he elevated his domestic despotism to the level of nationalist messian­ism, his personal power grab as a historical correction. The burst of democracy around him, in the near abroad, in the liberated republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union, fright­ened him, and their clamour for joining NATO (the Baltic republics are already members), an organisation that has rejected his own application for membership, deepened his hurt. The outright ‘Westernisation’ of Ukraine, which desperately seeks NATO membership, was a direct assault on his Great Russia project. Crimea 2014 was the warn­ing; today a West without the moral idealism to match his manic determination could only be a blustering bystander as the war on Ukraine intensifies.

He has been preparing for this war since the Maidan revo­lution that liberated Ukraine from Russia’s patronage in 2014. “We have lived together for centuries. Together we tri­umphed in the most horrible of wars. And we will continue to live together. And to those who want to divide us, I can only say one thing: the day will never come,” he had written in 2012. A Ukraine breaking away from his idea of collective destiny was a subversion of his grand vision of a Eurasia— and he dreaded the day. When the day of division came, there was virtually no one to stop him, at home or abroad. The simulated Russianness, a perfect alibi for a dictator who understands the uses of the Nation Outcast in the time of international adversity, did him no harm at home. His open defiance of international systems showed how much better he understood the weaknesses of his adversaries. With en­dorsement from the fellow dictator of eternity in Beijing, he has come to realise that borders have suddenly become too fragile to withstand the force of the imperial project.

The imperialist in his pursuit is guided by his spiritual guru, Ivan Ilyin, an apostle of Christian fascism, and, in the words of the American historian Timothy Snyder, “a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom”, and for whom, “the prin­ciple of democracy is the irresponsible human atom.” In his argument, as Snyder explains in his book on Russia, Europe and America, The Road to Unfreedom, the institution of redeemer alone could save Russia from democracy: “The redeemer would be responsible for all execu­tive, legislative, and judiciary functions, and command the armed forces. Russia would be a centralised state as the fascist regimes of the 1930s had been. That was one party so many. Russia should be a zero-party state, redeemed only by a man. Parties should exist, according to Ilyin, only to help ritualise elections.” There could not have been a better redeemer than Putin, a witness and a participant in Russia’s rise and decline. The man who has sent troops to Ukraine is the redeemer rearmed, daring the democratic usurper in Kyiv and the doddering lord of the free world in Washington. He dares to dare because history is on his side, history as written by the last Russian standing in the make-believe of an imperium.

As Snyder describes in his book, in his first speech in parliament as president, in 2012, Putin saw himself as Vladimir, the ruler of Kyiv. “The politics of eternity requires points in the past to which the present can cycle, demonstrat­ing the innocence of the country, the right to rule of its leader, and the pointlessness of think­ing about the future. Putin’s first such point was the year 988, when his namesake, an early me­dieval warlord known in his time as Volodymyr or Valdemar, converted to Christianity. In Putin’s myth of the past, Volodymyr/ Valdemar was a Russian whose conversion linked forever the lands of today’s Russia, Be­larus, and Ukraine.” This sense of destiny is in combat with a world that has not yet lost faith in its weakened institutions such as NATO, EU and UN. Emperors floating in their own my­thologies believe only in the politics of strength, and Putin doesn’t see it coming from the talking shops of the West. As Ukraine reeled under the invasion, its president reportedly tried to call Putin but couldn’t get through. He sent out an SOS to Russians. This plea for life and national dignity is the 21st century’s moment of moral reckoning. Then this world is different from the one that emerged in the wake of 1945, and later, in 1989; this one is indifferent, in spite of the lofty noise, and it is led by lesser leaders who are tentative about freedom. It’s the ideal playground for pumped-up im­perialists to play out their wildest transborder fantasies.

diplomacyRussia invades UkraineVladimir Putinwar